The Hurrah Game: Baseball in Northampton, 1823-1953
by Brian Turner and John S. Bowman

It's 1865 and the Civil War has just finished. Base Ball has been transformed into a truly national game by being spread through army camps. A group of these veterans form an all-star team from units from Western Massachussetts, to pass the time while awaiting discharge in camps around Washington DC. To their surprise, they run the field, winning the informal championship of all the Armies of the Potomac.

Memories linger among the All-stars of the other players they left behind at home. We left as boys, and those we left behind were better players than us then. Some were too young to go to war, some went and came home already, and many went and never returned. One All-Star player has the idea come to him: what better way to celebrate a homecoming than a game of Base and Ball? Why not challenge the locals back home to a match? To see how we stack up after these four long years? So much better to show the men we've become, the swagger of the victorious, the return of the champions of the field. So much the better to gently move back into civil life, to relive the days where a contest does not leave the loser dead and the victor haunted, to live in the twilight of youth one last time before going on the great business of living life, marriage, family, business, striving.

So it was that a challenge is issued, by letter, to the young men of Florence, Massachussetts, a hamlet just north of Northampton. The sons of Florence pool their best with other local teams called the Emmetts, the Hibernians, and the Northamptons to try to at least field a respectable nine to counter the Army All-Stars. The new hybrid team is known as the Florence Eagles. The teams meet to play on August 1st, 1865, in a bend in a tributary of the Connecticut river known as the Paradise Grounds.

"To the surprise of nearly everyone, the Eagle was victorious," reported the local paper. The score was not recorded.

The giddy Eagles decide to stay together for the remainder of the summer, and play five more games -- winning them all. Are we really that good? Could we challenge a more established club? Sheepishly concerned about their perfect record, the Eagles borrow the inscribed belts of the Bay State Fire company and masquerade as a team that has never existed -- the "Bay State" club -- to challenge the reigning state champions, the Hampdens. "Bay State" wins the match, but the Eagles cannot claim the championship Silver Ball as their own because of the name switch. Still, the club now knows they have something special. And so does the town.

For a small farming area, Florence and Northampton attracts a remarkably diverse -- for the era -- team. Future mayors and bankers play alongside members of a utopian commune. Old New England congregationalists play with Irish Catholics. Among the starting nine is first sacker Luther B. Askin, whose family have lived and worked in the area as long as any of the First Congregationalists. Askin is an African-American, a fact which receives no notice as being peculiar in any of the accounts of the games.

"Base Ball Fervor" grips the town over the winter. 100 subscribers, some players, some just fans, throw money into the cap to sponsor the Eagles. The team has meetings, forms by-laws, practices in barns and frozen fields with a second nine to hone their skills for the match season the following spring. The Florence Sewing Machine Company sews up some fancy uniforms and hats, and the subscriptions help pay for the fancy belt buckles that identifies a team as organized. The uniforms have an enormous shield on the front, featuring stars and stripes, long sleeves, and high collars. April 1866 brings the new seasons, and in the new uniforms, the Eagles cannot be stopped. They win every match, take every comer in the area.

In June, they decide to challenge the champion Hampdens again, this time under their own name. Alas, they lose the match. This only provides greater incentive to practice, and in the rematch against the Hampdens in August, they beat the Hampdens 38-28 and are awarded the rotating Silver Ball that signifies they are the champions of all Western Massachussetts.

Now the target of many challenges for the Silver Ball, the Eagles take on one and all, and remain undefeated. In the middle of the summer, they play a match against the big-city team, the Springfield Pioneers, in front of 5000 spectators -- some of whom are seen to be making wagers on the event.

The Hampdens, chafing under the loss of their Silver Ball, challenge the Eagles once again to a match in October. The Eagles lose a bitter match, in which they allege the Hampdens have lightened the ball to fit their style of play and defeat the 'Scientific' approach of the Florence team. The charge is rejected by the Commissioner of Western Massachussetts base ball, and the Silver Ball is lost.

The Eagles don't need this provincial pettiness. They know they're something even better than the Hampdens. In November, they decide to test their mettle as so many had before them and so many would later -- in the big city of New York. They travel to play the celebrated Excelsiors and Atlantics. They lose both matches, but fifty years later the starting nine, all still living, insist to a man they were the better club -- only the necessity of wearing heavy overcoats in the chilling November air, which impeded their fielding, prevented them from registering a triumph.

But the stuffing of the club has been knocked out a little. The headiness of instant success, of triumph followed by conflict and defeat, has taken some of the fun out of it. The Eagles, in April 1867, are nowhere to be found on the fields. The players have returned to their farms, their jobs, their sweethearts, determined to get past the kids' stuff.

Something gnaws at the players, though. They relive the triumphs over the Hampdens and the Pioneers and the near-triumphs over the Excelsiors and Atlantics, and the competitive juices begin to fire up. By July, the crops in, school over, they decide to get the club back together.

They're just as good as ever. They tear through teams from the area, and are declared the champions of Western Massachussetts and Connecticut, Silver Ball or no Silver Ball. How good are we? they ask one another. To find out once and for all, they issue two challenges to the Union Club of Lansingburgh, New York -- also known as the Troy Haymakers.

The Haymakers are an amateur club in name only. Populated initially from the ironworkers of Troy, they have a reputation for toughness, hard play -- and invincibility. On the dawn of the professional era, the Haymakers are the greatest amateur team of the era. The organizers of the Haymakers find themselves taking in much more in gate admissions than their expenses require. What was once a great past time is creeping towards a business. The silent business of the Haymakers depends on their continued success, on getting rubes from out of town to come challenge them at their own expense, on touring as Champs on that reputation. To preserve this distinction as the Best of the Best, the Haymakers have started to quietly hire, as professional guns, the best players from the nation to replace the locals.

Against the great Haymakers, the Florence Eagles have met their match. They challenge the Troy team twice, and lose twice. The Eagles have run their course, it seems.

But not quite yet. As the reigning Champions of Western Massachussetts, they are invited to the Championship of New England, to be held in Boston. The Eagles go for one last crown and accept the invitation.

The first three games are a breeze. The Eagles win in the preliminary matches, and face the Tri-Mountains of Boston for the championship. The prize: a silver bat. The Eagles can feel that bat. They can imagine how nice it would be to have that bat at their victory banquet at the hotel in downtown Northampton that winter; how the townspeople would admire it. How they'd know, in their heart of hearts, that they could be the best ever.

But something is amiss in the championship game. The umpire calls a runner for the Tri-Mountains safe when the Eagles thought he was out by a step. A ball struck by an Eagle that takes two bounces is called a one-bounce out by the ump. A.G. Hill, Short Stop and Captain, argues with the umpire, to no avail. Gradually it dawns on the Eagles: the fix is in. Whether it's gamblers wagering on the game, avid fans of the Tri-Mountains, or the Tri-Mountains themselves, consumed by a desire for the Silver Bat, the outcome has been pre-ordained.

The Eagles will lose the game on the field, no matter how well they play. So...they walk away. They leave in mid-game, forfeiting. The Silver Bat will be the trophy of the Boston Tri-Mountains, but it will be a tarnished silver that gleans in their hands. The Eagles leave, defeated on paper, but knowing they are the true champions.

In the off-season, there is some talk of re-forming the team. But it doesn't seem quite right. Several of the players have families to raise already, all have jobs or farms to attend to. The team quietly disbands.

Eight of the original Eagles survive to re-unite for a fiftieth anniversary celebration in 1916, including Luther Askin. The town remembers their exploits, mostly through re-telling, some of the older folks from direct memory. As each of this group dies in later years, their accomplishments -- as Mayor, state legislator, Judge, businessman, factory foreman, fireman -- are noted, but subsidiary to the great distinction of their lives. They were on the legendary Florence Eagles, 1865-67.

A photograph is taken of the re-uniting players, but Luther Askin is not in the picture. The team does not exclude Askin. He excludes himself. Askin has worked as a foreman at the local brush factory for fifty years, a respected member of the town community. He's done as well for himself as a person of color can do in this era. But times, never good, have gotten harder for African-Americans. The color line, lightly lifted during reconstruction, has been heavily slammed down. Askin could play with his ancestors of European ancestry, but his children, alas, cannnot. Luther Askin has done as well as he can by them, giving them a classical liberal education. His son -- his namesake, Luther Askin, Junior -- is talented enough to get steady employment as a bandleader in New York, and has a bit of a name for himself. But Luther Askin, Junior, can only keep this job because he's "passing" for white.

So the news accounts of the reunion say Luther Askin is there, and warmly welcomed by his old team, but he does not want his picture in the paper. For his son's sake. Obscurity for the great old ballplayer is security.

Luther Askin dies in 1929, at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, New York, just as the Dodgers' season opens. He has moved to Brooklyn after a lifetime in Florence to be cared for by his family, which have dispersed. He is the last surviving member of the Eagles. He may also be the first African-American player on an integrated team in baseball history.

This fact may have been lost to history, except for one Jim Ryan.

Jim Ryan got a job at the brush factory where Askin was supervisor in the early 1920s. A the factory, the young base ball fan listens to Askin's recollections of the old baseball days. Jim Ryan becomes a life long amateur historian of the great base ball days of Florence and Northampton. He dies in 2000, at the age of 101, but not before striking up a friendship with Brian Turner, a writing teacher at Smith College and local historian. By this great fortune, Turner is able to get, only second-hand, acccounts of base ball from the dawn of the organized era, and third-hand of base ball played in the earliest days of the nineteenth century.

And thus we have The Hurrah Game: Baseball in Northampton, 1823-1953, by Turner and John S. Bowman. This book is really an exhibition catalog for a show at the Museum and Education center in Northampton held in 2002. As such, it's not a true history of baseball in this nook of Western Massachussetts so much as it's a lovingly annotated scrapbook. The words in The Hurrah Game don't tell but half the story of the Florence Eagles; the pictures, objects, newspaper clippings, box scores are so suggestive they fill in many lost narrative details. The Florence Eagles live on. Luther Askin's unique distinction has been recovered.

There's far more to The Hurrah Game than just the Florence Eagles. The book/exhibit covers the local history of the game in tidbits and anecdotes through the boom years of amateur baseball, in which the town of Northampton's team briefly achieves minor league status, through to the end of the era when small town baseball teams were important to the life of the town, in the 1950s. Fittingly it ends with an account of the career of Stu Miller, All-Star closer in the major leagues, Northampton's first and last big-league star. The townspeople could occasionally catch Stu on the television: what need to trudge out to the Driving Park Grandstand to see a local nine when the best of the best was beamed right into your living room?

Along the way, there's a delicious smorgasbord of tidbits. Women playing at Smith College in the 1880s. The Cuban Giants playing in the 1890s and the Buck Ewing All-Stars touring through in the 1930s. Black-listed Black Sox George "Bucky" Weaver playing for a bare three weeks in 1910 because he "wasn't good enough for Northampton." The celebrated murder-suicide by troubled Boston Red Sox catcher Marty Bergen in 1900, sensational local news that was talked about for decades. The brief minor league career of the Northampton Meadowlarks. Major League teams making brief exhibition appearances. The local boy, Jack Carr, who bested Cy Young in such an exhibition but stayed home to play (trying out for the local minor league club at aged 52), only to reunite in his 80s with Young at a Boston bar.

Atmospheric scientists drill through hundreds of feet of glacier ice to get a core of ice frozen millenia ago, so much the better to study how things were and how things have changed. A good local history, a good local baseball history, can tell you as much about the history of the country and the history of our game as any twenty-pound encyclopedic tome endorsed by a Hall of Famer and sponsored, for a price, by Major League Baseball as "official". This book is as good of a core sampler of baseball as I've seen. You may not be able to find a copy, but there may be a similar local history of your own area -- go get it. You'll find your own core within.